The ICL's New Line in Mexico

To
Fight the Popular Front
You Have to Recognize That It Exists

Open Letter to the Grupo
Espartaquista de México and the Juventud
Espartaquista

The following is a translation of a leaflet issued
by the Internationalist Group in Mexico on 5 May 1997.

Dear Comrades:

The Grupo Espartaquista de México (GEM)
was founded in struggle against the Cardenista popular
front. In this struggle, weapplied
to Mexico the program of the Spartacist tendency (now
the Internationalist Communist League) of intransigent
proletarian opposition to all popular fronts, which
subordinate the exploited and oppressed to the
politicians and institutions of the bourgeoisie.

But now, as part of the right turn of
the ICL leadership, the GEM denies the existence in
Mexico of a popular front, a
class-collaborationist coalition. This revision of
fundamental conceptions on Mexico can only disorient
those who seek to fight against the subordination of the
exploited and oppressed to the bourgeois "opposition."
Without such a struggle, it is impossible to forge the
Trotskyist party which is needed to lead the socialist
revolution.

The Internationalist Group, formed by
leading cadres of the ICL expelled last year, has noted
that the recent events in the ICL have their own logic.
The bureaucratic expulsions paved the way for a betrayal
in Brazil. The ICL had correctly encouraged the struggle
of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil/Luta
Metalúrgica to throw police out of the Volta Redonda
municipal workers union. But when the struggle heated
up, the "new I.S." (International Secretariat) of the
ICL decided it posed "unacceptable risks to the
vanguard" and called on the LQB to abandon the struggle,
dissociate itself publicly from the union leadership and
even get out of town. When the Brazilian comrades did
not agree to act in this irresponsible and treacherous
way, the ICL handed them a sealed envelope with a letter
breaking fraternal relations with the LQB--one day
before the 19 June 1996 union meeting where the
disaffiliation of the cops was scheduled to be voted.
The I.S. attempted to cover its flight from this
important class battle by heaping one slander after
another on top of the Brazilian comrades.

In our publications we have shown that
the ICL's turn has been accompanied, as is the
historical norm in these cases, by the revision of basic
conceptions held by the organization for many years. The
effective defense of an immigrant hostel in Berlin,
carried out in 1993, was renounced. A new line was
"discovered" on the capitalist reunification of Germany:
During the intervention in the German events of 1989-90,
the most important intervention in its history, the ICL
stressed that the Western bourgeoisie used the Social
Democracy as its "spearhead" and "Trojan horse" for
counterrevolution, while the Stalinists capitulated and
sold out the bureaucratically deformed workers state.
But now the new line says that the Stalinists not only
played a counterrevolutionary role (which is correct)
but that they literally led the counterrevolution (which
is false and disorienting). (For more details, see issue
No. 2 of The Internationalist.)

Now the conceptions which the ICL put
forward on Mexico since before the foundation of the GEM
are being revised, conceptions that were expressed not
only in the first seven issues of Espartaco [newspaper
of the GEM], but in the ICL's other publications as
well. We had already noted that starting with issue No.
8, Espartaco stopped referring to the semi-bonapartist
nature of the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary
Party]/government regime, which for decades has rested
largely on the corporatist structures of the
CTM [the state-controlled Federation of Mexican Labor],
and which is now in crisis. The same is the case with Workers
Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S.:
the articles on Mexico published in issues No. 647 (7
June 1996), No. 658 (27 December 1996) and No. 664 (21
March 1997) do not refer to the semi-bonapartist nature
of the PRI regime, nor to the serious political crisis
it confronts today, nor do they put forward transitional
demands for proletarian struggle.

Espartaco No. 9 (Spring-Summer
1997) recently came out, and it struck us that while it
correctly denounces the bourgeois character of the Party
of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) of Cuauhtémoc
Cárdenas, it makes no reference to the popular front.
Nevertheless, we did not want to jump to conclusions.
Nor did we want to launch a phony polemic such as the
one put forward by the ICL when it absurdly and
dishonestly accuses us of "disappearing" the theory of
permanent revolution, when anyone who reads our
publications can see that the permanent revolution is an
essential part of our program. So we decided to check it
out.

At a student protest we asked the
editor of Espartaco, and he told us that, sure
enough, they had changed the line and they now hold that
there is no popular front in Mexico. Then, during
the May Day march we asked several GEM comrades, who
confirmed that this is the new line and that the
formulations in the new issue were "carefully" written.
However, Espartaco has changed its line without
explaining this change to its readers, who since the
publication was founded had read that there is a popular
front in this country. Meanwhile, we were told the fairy
tale that "before," Espartaco used to talk
about the existence of a popular front in Mexico due to
the nefarious influence of its previous editor, who was
one of the comrades purged last year.

Origin and Function
of the Cardenista Popular Front

In response to a wave of workers'
strikes, student protests and unrest in the countryside,
a new popular front arose in Mexico in 1987-88 under the
leadership of long-time PRI politicians Cuauhtémoc
Cárdenas and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo. Passing through a
series of forms and incarnations, this popular front has
always had the same function: to tie the exploited to
the exploiters and channel their discontent toward a
"recycled" bourgeois alternative, given the crisis of
the semi-bonapartist PRI/government regime.

We always emphasized that the struggle
against this popular front is key to the construction of
a Trotskyist party in Mexico. After the Mexico station
of the international Spartacist tendency was founded in
1988, one of its founders made a public declaration at a
meeting called by the Mandelite PRT (and attended by
Ernest Mandel and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas) at the Leon
Trotsky Museum. The Spartacist representative
emphasized:

"Today in Mexico a new popular
front has been formed. Trotsky defined the popular
front as a class-collaborationist alliance
subordinating the proletariat to a sector of the
exploiters. . . . Against the popular front, and
against the apologists for the popular front,
Trotsky founded the Fourth International, world
party of socialist revolution. It is necessary to
reforge that Bolshevik-Leninist Fourth
International of Trotsky."

This declaration is reproduced in the
Spanish-language edition of Spartacist No. 21
(October 1988), together with an article explaining the
crisis of "the semi-bonapartist regime in Mexico, now in
full decay" and the role of the "corporatist,
gangster-buttressed CTM union bureaucracy which to this
day enforces PRI control of the labor and peasant
movements." Under the subtitle, "Cárdenas and the New
Popular Front," another article in the same issue
explained the origins of this popular front and how it
was joined by countless leaders of "independent" unions,
fake leftists, former guerrillaists, etc. [These two
articles were adapted from the English versions
published in Workers Vanguard Nos. 456 and 457
(1 and 15 July 1988).]

But the popular front and its malignant
role in the subordination of the workers and peasants,
as well as of discontented youth, did not cease to exist
after the elections held on 6 July 1988. The first
leaflet published by the Grupo Espartaquista de México,
on the national strike carried out in 1989 by half a
million dissident teachers, stressed: "The key is a
Trotskyist workers party, forged on the basis of the
program of the permanent revolution, which fights not
only against the PRI government but also against the
'back-up option' of the Mexican (and international)
bourgeoisie: the Cardenista popular front."

A leaflet against the Mexican
Mandelites, "The PRT in the Cárdenas Popular Front" (30
October 1989) explained that Cárdenas' new bourgeois
party, the PRD was leading a popular front and that the
latter was not only of an electoral nature:

"The PRT leadership maintains that
it is not convenient to make an 'electoral' front
with the bourgeois PRD, but that it is fine to
swear loyalty to the bourgeois state as part of a
'patriotic front' with the PRD. Surprising as it
may be to parliamentary cretins, history has known
many 'non-electoral' popular fronts, from China in
1927, Spain through three years of civil war and
the support of the Stalinist CPs to 'democratic'
imperialism in the Second World War, to the
'clandestine' popular fronts formed in Bolivia,
Chile and other countries."

In June 1990, the fusion bulletin of
the GEM and the Trotskyist Faction expelled by the
Morenoites (Del morenismo al trotskismo: La Cuestión
Rusa a quemarropa) referred to the "popular front
of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas," and the fight against this
class-collaborationist alliance was a central point in
"What is Espartaco and What Does it Want," the article
which introduced the GEM's publication, which resulted
from this fusion. Another article from Espartaco No.
1 (Winter 1990-91) gave a detailed explanation of our
principled policy against this popular front. The same
conceptions were expressed in each of the subsequent
issues of Espartaco; in the joint declaration
against the North American Free Trade Agreement by the
Canadian U.S. and Mexican sections of the ICL; in the
founding declaration of the Juventud Espartaquista
(Spartacist Youth; see Espartaco No. 7, Winter
1995-96) and all the other key documents.

But is it true that the profusion of
references to the popular front in the Mexican
Spartacist press was due to some kind of diabolical
conspiracy? This theory is absurd on the face of it, as
absurd as the many other accusations of the same kind
that have been made. But if anyone takes it seriously,
all they have to do is consult the other publications of
the ICL, from Workers Vanguard and Women
and Revolution (see No. 38, Winter 1990-91) to Spartacist,
organ of the ICL. In fact, the document of the ICL's
Second International Conference contains a section on
Mexico which begins:

"Mexico City Station was
established by implantation in 1988, at a time of
considerable labor and political turmoil. It was
the first Spartacist group functioning in Latin
America. In the face of nationalist left support
for the bourgeois presidential candidacy of
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, including indirectly from the
Mandelites and Morenoites, our tiny group has been
unique in its unflinching proletarian opposition
to this popular-frontism and its exposure of the
leftís capitulation to it. While support for the
Cardenista popular front crested in the '88
elections and has since considerably ebbed, it has
played a key role in derailing class struggle."
--"For the Communism of Lenin and Trotsky!" Spartacist
No. 47-48 (Winter 1992-93)

How could it derail the class struggle
if it did not exist? The point is that it did exist and
it continues to exist. (As for the Mandelite party, it
liquidated so as to better submerge itself in the
popular front, while each of the spectrum of Morenoite
groups capitulates to the popular front in its own way.)

Implications of the
New Line

This is not an academic discussion. If
you do not understand the functions and the crisis of
the semi- bonapartist structure in Mexico, it is
impossible to programmatically orient the Mexican
proletariat to break the corporatist stranglehold and
build the revolutionary, internationalist workers party
which is indispensable for the socialist revolution. If
you do not understand the question of the popular front,
that means being disoriented in the struggle for the
political independence of the working class. When
Salvador Allende formed the Unidad Popular in 1970 in
Chile, the Morenoites denied that the UP was a popular
front, because they wanted to capitulate to this
class-collaborationist front. In Mexico, the
"ex-Morenoite" Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo
denies the existence of an "organic" popular front. This
line served them when it came to sowing illusions in the
National Democratic Convention (CND) and other
popular-frontist groupings.

But even if one does not seek to
capitulate to the popular front, it is difficult to
fight it if you deny its existence!

The question of the CND is a good
example. To deny the existence of the popular front
would have blunted the revolutionary edge of the
Trotskyist position on this assembly, which was called
two years ago by the EZLN. While defending the
Zapatistas against repression by the bourgeois state,
the GEM correctly wrote, in a front-page article
highlighting the slogans "Break with the Popular Front!
Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!":

"Thus this petty-bourgeois
nationalist movement used its moral and political
authority to strengthen the bourgeois popular
front led by the PRD, calling on Cárdenas to head
up a 'movement of national liberation,' a
(bourgeois) transition government, etc. This was
the programmatic basis for the calls on 'civil
society' with the 'National Democratic Convention'
and the 'consultation' carried out this summer,
after which Marcos called for a 'National Dialogue
among all patriotic forces'."--Espartaco No. 7 (Winter 1995-96)

The EZLN then united with a range of
forces to form the Frente Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional, which in reality serves as another instrument
to "unofficially" subordinate rebellious sectors to the
bourgeois party of Cárdenas, the PRD.

And what about today? According to the
new line of the GEM, how can one understand the
subordination to the PRD of a whole range of
trade-union, peasant, student, slum dwellers', women's
and other organizations which do not form an organic
part of that party? Do you believe that a popular front
cannot exist unless it has an "official" name and an
"organic" structure? The writings of Trotsky, as well as
more than years of Spartacist publications, amply show
that this is not the case.

A few days ago, on May Day, we saw the
popular front in action. In the Zócalo (Mexico City's
central plaza) there were two rallies. In front of the
cathedral were the "dissident" charros [pro-government
"union" bureaucrats] from the Congress of Labor (CT)
grouped in the Labor Forum. In front of City Hall was
the platform of the Intersindical (Union Coordinating
Committee) that is, the popular-frontist opposition to
the PRI "unionism" of the CTM and CT. There were
speeches by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the PRD's candidate for
Mexico City mayor, and by Benito Mirón Lince, lawyer for
the SUTAUR bus drivers' union and now a PRD "non-member
candidate" for federal deputy and member of the FAC-MLN
(Broad Front for the Construction of a National
Liberation Movement), an extra-parliamentary component
of the Cardenista popular front. Of the several union
speakers, the spokesman for the La Jornada newspaper
workers union ìstated that the economic changes demanded
by the working class must first be political changes--in
other words, a scarcely veiled call to vote for the
bourgeois opposition in the upcoming elections.

It is very likely that Cárdenas may win
the election, with explicit or tacit support from
innumerable organizations that are not an organic part
of the bourgeois PRD. In La Jornada (2 May) we
read the following:

"Yesterday the Party of the
Democratic Revolution (PRD) released the final
list of its nationwide candidates for the
parliamentary elections, made up of leaders of
university unions, the SNTE [teachers union] and
FAT [Authentic Labor Front]; also of peasant
organizations such as the CIOAC, UNTA and CODUC,
ex-members of the CNC [pro- government peasant
federation], the UCD; leaders and activists from
the El Barzón [debtors movement] and slum
dwellers' organizations.... In the first places on
the list, more than 50 per cent of the candidates
were not members [of the PRD]."

Yes, there is a popular front in
Mexico! Due to the crisis of the semi-bonapartist PRI
regime, the bourgeoisie needs the popular front as a
bourgeois "alternative." To deny its existence is
hazardous to the Trotskyist program.

The fight for genuine class
independence, which is possible only under revolutionary
leadership, is an urgent and basic task. It is necessary
to fight to break the control over the proletariat
exercised not only by the PRI but by the bourgeoisie as
a whole. Above and beyond the disputes dividing the
various union tops, there is a common effort to
subordinate the working class to "the historic alliance
between the workers of Mexico and the Mexican state," as
president Zedillo put it in his speech to the CTM/CT
officials who shut themselves inside the National
Auditorium. The [CT dissidents'] Labor Forum wants to
take the place of the worn-out apparatus of Fidel
Velázquez [head of the CTM] as the main instrument for
regimenting the workers. For their part, the popular
frontists seek to reformulate this "alliance," in
reality a straitjacket for the exploited, through the
victory of that neo-PRI, the PRD.

But if you deny the existence of the
popular front, you cannot fight for the unions to break
from it. If the proletariat does not break from the
Cardenista popular front, it cannot fight for power, for
a workers and peasants government and the extension of
socialist revolution to the south and above all to the
imperialist metropolis, the U.S. In denying even the
existence of the popular front, the leadership of the
GEM and the ICL shows they are not interested in
fighting for revolutionary leadership of the working
class.

The recent publications and behavior of
the ICL give the impression of an organization which has
lost its political moorings. This is not surprising.
First the conceptions on what occurred in Germany were
revised. Then came the purge in Mexico, the bureaucratic
expulsions and the betrayal in Brazil. Now basic
conceptions on Mexico are thrown overboard. What next?